Designing Healthy Communities

Design Decisions and Public Health

A provocative and challenging new 4-hour public television series (2012), Designing Healthy Communities, hosted by celebrated author and teacher Richard Jackson, MD, MPH. Dr. Jackson makes the case that the rapidly deteriorating public health of our citizens is linked directly to nearly half-a-century of bad design decisions, now frozen in concrete. Each of the 4 hours looks at the different impacts our built environment in urban and suburbia areas have on key public health indices---obesity, diabetes, heart, asthma, cancer and depression. Dr. Jackson links bad community design with burgeoning health costs, then analyses and illustrates how ordinary citizens, including many young people, are trying to do about this urgent crisis, by looking upstream for solutions before ill health and disease occurs. Dr. Jackson inhabits the frontier between public health and urban planning, and offers us hopeful examples of innovative transformations.

Dr. Jackson searches past and present America for healthy, sustainable communities of all sizes and shapes that can serve as models for the rest of the nation. His journey takes him to Roseto, PA, Prairie Crossing, IL, New York City, Charleston, SC, and the forgotten 1960s urban renewal project of…

Dr. Jackson believes it is every citizen's right to live in a clean, healthy environment. This isn't the case for many low-income neighborhoods, built near big transportation hubs and struggling industrial cities like Oakland, CA and Detroit, MI. We meet a morbidly obese grandmother struggling to raise seven grandchildren, all…

When U.S. industry and manufacturing collapsed or went elsewhere, cities like Elgin, IL, and Syracuse, NY, (like many communities in the United States) were left with the task of redefining themselves for a new paradigm. Leading the way to a greener, more sustainable Elgin is a group of high school…

The Light Bulb Conspiracy uncovers how planned obsolescence has shaped our lives and economy since the 1920's, when manufacturers deliberately started shortening the life of consumer products to increase demand. The film also profiles a new generation of consumers, designers and business people who have started challenging planned obsolescence as…

Shipping Home follows the year-long construction of Asheville, North Carolina's first shipping container residence. However, this is no HGTV fairytale - Ryan and Brook must balance life and parenthood with their aspirations of a sustainable dream house.

This is the story of the Ford Mustang, one of the world's most iconic and recognizable cars. It follows the team entrusted with upholding the legacy of the brand in creating the 2015 model, now 50 years from the original release, while exploring the parallels that exist between past and…

Explore our complex relationship with manufactured objects and the people who design them. OBJECTIFIED is a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It's about the designers who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis.
Through verite footage and in-depth…

Easy Like Water profiles one man's resourceful quest to fight the effects of climate change in the developing world through the power of "design for good" - a growing global movement to encourage design-driven social change as a community-based response to the challenges brought on by the new climate reality.…

An icon of modern architecture, the Melnikov House designed by world-famous architect Konstantin Melnikov (1890 - 1974) tells the incredible story of how this utopian design from the late 1920's in Moscow imprisoned the fate of the architect when Joseph Stalin prohibited modern architecture from the Soviet Union. Hear the…

On the eve of the Second World War, Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898 - 1976) designed the Villa Mairea for his close friends, Maire and Harry Gullichsen, in Noormarkku near the west coast of Finland. Located in a pine forest adjoining an old sawmill area, the house was to become…

The wooden cabin situated in the hillside of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in the French Riviera was to serve as a model for minimal living. However, when architect and painter Le Corbusier sketched his Thoreau-like hut in December 1951, he did so in 45 minutes as a birthday present for his wife Yvonne.…